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Being on call sucks

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Re: Being on call sucks

#241

Post by niij »

PeterisP wrote: post #238
niij wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone works an on-call rotation and was told about it during the interview process then I see no issue with it. It's baked into the agreed-upon compensation already. I don't see how you can declare what an employer/employee are allowed to agree to. Working an on-call is completely reasonable for a salaried employee. If the terms changed after you were hired and you're bound by a contract (and cannot leave withou…

> I don't see how you can declare what an employer/employee are allowed to agree to. Okay, I am coming from a non-US perspective where it's obvious that you can declare what employer/employee are allowed to agree to - "employee rights" means those things which are unalienable and nonnegotiable. I'll simply quote the universal declaration of human rights "24. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reaso…

and that's great in theory, yet incredibly vague. I doubt it's targeting HCI that are predominantly on-call: medical professionals, infrastructure engineers, programmers, etc. I picture it as critical of 996 working hours and similar.

In any case I suppose we have different expectations on what's reasonable. If you think a handful of pages per year from my consentual employer is infringing on my fundamental human rights then there's not much I can say to convince you otherwise.

Re: Being on call sucks

#242

Post by throw0101a »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #214
scottlamb wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and even more importantly: compensate your engineers who minimize the need for these kinds of heroics. Ones who: * fix the alerts so they reliably page when there's a SLO-worthy problem and only then. * test the restore system so it works smoothly when needed at the necessary scale. * add safety checks to prevent the need to use those backups in the first place. * get to the root cause of yesterday's outage and…

> They're often avoidable. Avoidance isn't the goal of mgmt though. Cost minimization is, and by quantizing the compensation portion it can help figure out the cost of a bug. Ultimately the cost of a bug is a key variable in the decision to prevent or solve. The cost can easily vary from $0 (eg at a startup with no customers) or to millions (maybe billions?) when you consider the risk of brand damage, lost ARR (multi…

> Avoidance isn't the goal of mgmt though. Cost minimization is […]

How about (net) value creation? Whose goal is that?

Minimize costs all you want, but if your service is garbage you won't be getting (as) much income either.

Re: Being on call sucks

#243

Post by sam0x17 »

mlyle wrote: post #192
sam0x17 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many orgs do comp their employees for the entire time they are on call. DoD does this for on-call employees due to past labor law issues, so it probably is legally required but rarely enforced.

DoD comps at 10% of overtime rate when not actively working an issue. https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/14... The comment I replied to appeared to advocate for 100%.

I would advocate for 100% but 10% is way better than 0%. I didn't have any on-call peers during my time in DoD so I'm unfamiliar with the structure for that arrangement, but very familiar with regular overtime stuff with DoD.

Re: Being on call sucks

#244

Post by PeterisP »

niij wrote: post #241
PeterisP wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how you can declare what an employer/employee are allowed to agree to. Okay, I am coming from a non-US perspective where it's obvious that you can declare what employer/employee are allowed to agree to - "employee rights" means those things which are unalienable and nonnegotiable. I'll simply quote the universal declaration of human rights "24. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reaso…

and that's great in theory, yet incredibly vague. I doubt it's targeting HCI that are predominantly on-call: medical professionals, infrastructure engineers, programmers, etc. I picture it as critical of 996 working hours and similar. In any case I suppose we have different expectations on what's reasonable. If you think a handful of pages per year from my consentual employer is infringing on my fundamental human rig…

I'm looking at this exactly from the perspective of jobs like medical professionals, infrastructure engineers - I have worked in power infrastructure and have relatives in medicine - where locally none of them are on-call (because the law proscribes this clear boundary); they do 12-18-24 hour shifts of work time, and once the shift ends, they can be (and often are) unreachable. It's not vague, it's extremely clear and simple. Even in a low-volume alert-monitoring position for infrastructure where you might get a few incidents per week (so zero incidents on a median shift) every shift is work time, and scheduled appropriately.

It's not about the number of pages you get, but about the differing expectations on boundaries between your employer and your private time. I do have a strong expectation that employers should not be able to set any restrictions of what people will do in their non-work time, or even ask whether the employer will be out-of-service this weekend, in my opinion that is crossing a line.

As I said, it's entirely reasonable if you get a handful of pages per year and service them - I also have been in roles where I got a handful of night calls per year and happily did what was useful, and I'd expect that in most cases that's okay for most people. However, if it becomes a requirement where I or you must be "on alert" for a whole week, then IMHO that's not reasonable anymore; I answered those calls but I had no duty to be ready for them and abstain from activities that make me unreachable, and if I had a contractual obligation to do so that would be unreasonable (and also a void, unenforceable clause violating employment law). And if you did not volunteer for it but an employer "pushed" this unreasonable requirement on you (e.g. as a condition for employment) then I would actually say that this violated your human rights even if you got zero pages per year; employees should have the practical right to freely decide how they spend their non-work time during the week (and they should have appropriate non-work time) no matter what contracts they sign.

Re: Being on call sucks

#245

Post by axus »

bpodgursky wrote: post #225
raverbashing wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And some even later than that, when they go to fix something and they realize they don't know how

It's your job to make your work visible.

Visible to who? Certainly the request to work outside of their normal schedule, and the report that an issue was resolved are seen by more than just the person responding to the request?

Re: Being on call sucks

#246

Post by niij »

PeterisP wrote: post #244
niij wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and that's great in theory, yet incredibly vague. I doubt it's targeting HCI that are predominantly on-call: medical professionals, infrastructure engineers, programmers, etc. I picture it as critical of 996 working hours and similar. In any case I suppose we have different expectations on what's reasonable. If you think a handful of pages per year from my consentual employer is infringing on my fundamental human rig…

I'm looking at this exactly from the perspective of jobs like medical professionals, infrastructure engineers - I have worked in power infrastructure and have relatives in medicine - where locally none of them are on-call (because the law proscribes this clear boundary); they do 12-18-24 hour shifts of work time, and once the shift ends, they can be (and often are) unreachable. It's not vague, it's extremely clear an…

> where locally none of them are on-call (because the law proscribes this clear boundary); they do 12-18-24 hour shifts of work time

24 hour shifts? Sounds like a real worker's paradise. I'll keep my 7-8 hour days with bi-monthly on-call over that, thanks. I'm glad you aren't legislating where I live; I am much happier with the choices and trade-offs in my life than what you or any euro-crat could dream up to "protect" me.

> if you did not volunteer for it but an employer "pushed" this unreasonable requirement on you (e.g. as a condition for employment)

You have a very different concept of what voluntary and self-agency mean than I do.

Re: Being on call sucks

#247

Post by dekhn »

cletus wrote: post #190
dekhn wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the on-call bonus is not entirely known. I had managers try to put my team "on-call" for a product and after I explained to them how Google actually did it, they suddenly said "oh, it's not really on-call. You just have to be ready to answer the pager at any time and respond". I was also on what was one of the most dysfunctional on-calls at the company- keeping several distributed clusters of unique busines…

I've experienced this as well and it's a sign of a really bad amanger (IME). No manager should give you any resistance to giving away free money from the company to their team. If they ever do you know where their loyalties lie: with their management chain and producing the appearance of efficacy. A manager should be fighting to give the team any on-call pay they're due. Related side story: annual bonuses were (and m…

I'd rather not go on call than get more money. That said, I kept such a good eye on prod that my team often identified problems with roll-outs in unrelated products that we didn't have control over and managed to stop them before they broke anything related to revenue. This has a neutral effect on perf.

Re: Being on call sucks

#248

Post by tharkun__ »

hyperman1 wrote: post #211
Aeolun wrote: post #138

> Does anyone have One Weird Trick™ to fix it? My one weird trick is to have a zero tolerance policy for flaky monitors/tests. If it’s not accurate, we either have to drop everything else and fix it, or disable that alarm entirely. Like they say, normalization of deviance is real, and the only way to fight against it is to have every form of deviance be a problem.

I tend to agree with you, but found an exception a while ago. A certain file has to appear before a specific time, or else some people don't get money they deserve and rightfully get very angry. Except 1 or 2 times per year there is nobody in that situation. No payments have to be made. No file appears, as other alerts would signal an empty file. As the relevant time was in business hours and the thing was important,…

Unacceptable. Make sure that the file is there but empty if nobody needs to get money. If empty could be a failure case, have a 'this page intentionally left blank' type arrangement for the file contents. Done, no monitor exceptions.

Re: Being on call sucks

#249

Post by reddiky »

mlyle wrote: post #179
HelloNurse wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "expectation"? One day on call, one day paid overtime; anything else is abusive. There should be no incentive to require or avoid "free" work, only advance planning of who'll be on call (with more available engineers doing more turns).

> What do you mean by "expectation"? One day on call, one day paid overtime; anything else is abusive. I don't think being available for work if an unlikely emergency comes up usually justifies the same comp as actively working that entire time.

If you're having to actively shape your real life to accommodate your work life then you should be compensated (Not attending events / bringing your computer with you to dinner, etc). Do firefighters only get paid for the amount of time actively fighting fires?

Re: Being on call sucks

#250

Post by yek »

bennysomething wrote: post #224

Being on call should just be paid at the normal hourly rate. It's an outrageous setup up: we need you to available but don't want to pay you for it. I did it for a few years and it made me pretty depressed. By the end of it I stopped giving a shit and just resumed my normal Friday night of having a few beers (or a lot of beers). At first they offered me a rate that was less than min wage. I said no until it was an ac…

Are there any companies out there that will pay the normal rate?

Google is the only place I've ever worked that will compensate for oncall, and even then it's at 2/3 for Tier 1 or 1/3 for Tier 2.

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